I’m so lucky, it’s another sunny day!! On board the Upper Manhattan and Bronx bus tour…the cathedral of St John the Divine was originally designed in the Byzantine Revival-Romanesque Revival styles, the plan was changed after 1909 to a Gothic Revival design. Gorgeous figures of saints carved into exterior columns on the western side of the church.

The General Grant National Memorial, Morningside Heights is the I’final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), the 18th President of the United States, and his wife, Julia Dent Grant (1826–1902). As commanding general, Grant led the Union Armies to victory over the Confederacy in the American Civil War, which ended shortly after Robert E. Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox in 1865.

Malcolm Shabazz Mosque was where Malcolm X preached until he left the Nation of Islam in 1964. Malcolm X, 1925 – 1965, was an African-American Muslim minister and a human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of blacks, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans; detractors accused him of preaching racism and violence. He has been called one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. 

The Apollo Theater in the Harlem neighbourhood of Manhattan is a noted venue for African-American performers. The theater, which has a capacity of 1506, in 1934, was opened to black patrons – previously it had been a whites-only venue. The Hall of Fame has inducted such renowned performers and music-industry figures as Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight &The Pips, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Chaka Khan and Patti LaBelle.

WOWIE, AWESOME, FABULICIOUS! I’m talking The Met! Went to its modern art section and luxuriated in previous loves….Monet, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissarro, Klee, Klimt. NEW loves….Paul Sigac, Henri Regnault, Joseph Stella and Man Ray. Loved the stained glass of “Joseph’s brethren discover money in their grain sacks”, ca. 1530! 

‘ Ugolino and his sons’ by Carpeaux is an art work located just outside one lunch place in the Met. This intensely Romantic sculpture derives from the passage in Inferno, in which Dante describes the imprisonment in 1288 and subsequent death by starvation of the Pisan count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his offspring. Carpeaux depicts the moment when Ugolino, condemned to die of starvation, does not accept his children’s entreaties to eat them!  Carpeaux had a painstaking concern with anatomical realism. A sensation in Rome, it brought Carpeaux many commissions.

A walk through Central Park yielded an energetic and fun performance from some Bronx gymnasts and at ‘Strawberry Fields’ section of the park, some sensational community singing of John Lennon’s music on his birthday…what a day !!